Ann Taves

Research is focused on using historical materials to explore how people make sense of ambiguous events and experiences that inhabit the space between imagination and reality, craziness and inspiration, fiction and faith. That is, the underlying processes whereby people decide that experiences and events are religious and then, in some cases, develop traditions of practice to recreate them in the present. She is the author of two books: Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (1999) and The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (1986), and more recently, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (2009) She is past President of the American Academy of Religion.